Looking for Diet Plans For Weight Loss

The amount of calories needed will differ from person to person, and it varies with age, weight, height, gender, and level of physical activity, just to name a few relevant factors.

How Many Calories Do I Need?

You'll need to find out what your (BMR) or Basal Metabolic Rate is. This is the minimum amount of calories or energy from food you need to stay alive at rest and it accounts for 60-70 percent of your daily calorie expenditure.

This is the energy you use to breathe, blink your eyes, use of your lungs, and for basic bodily functions. This does not include calories used for other daily activities like making the bed or taking out the garbage, for example.

When trying to build your own diet plans for weight loss you`ll need to figure out how many calories you need to take in to lose the weight and it's a good idea to know how many calories you need to simply stay alive.

Finding your BMR is an important step in constructing diet plans for weight loss. To be as accurate as possible, you need to do it in a controlled environment like a hospital, where you will stay awake and completely still while they run tests on you. This is pretty time-consuming but it is, however, possible to get an estimate by using data such as your age, weight, height, and gender.

An generalization that is widely used estimates that the average person needs no less that 1000 calories a day to stay alive, so dietitians will tell you not to consume less than 1000 calories a day for this reason.

Here's a simple formula to calculate your personal BMR, it's called the Harris-Benedict Methodand it's used pretty widely, but keep in mind that this formula is used for adults only.

Women:

Men:

Something else to keep in mind is that this formula alone doesn't take into account the kind of lifestyle you lead in terms of being active or not. Choose your lifestyle from below and multiply it by your BMR to get your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE)

• If you lead a sedentary lifestyle meaning no physical activity at all. BMRx1.2=TDEE

• Lightly active. BMRx1.357=TDEE

• Moderately active (exercise most days a week). BMRx1.55=TDEE

• Very active( high intensity training most days of the week or for extended periods of time). BMRx1.725=TDEE

• Extra active (Hard labour or hard athletic training). BMRx1.9=TDEE

If you don't want to go through all of the calculations you can use this BMR calculator which will also give you your TDEE.

How To Use this Information

Once you have your BMR and your TDEE you'll have to set a goal before creating your diet plans for weight loss. A safe goal is aiming to shed 1-2 pounds per week, any more and you might start losing muscle.

A pound of fat equals 3,500 calories. So for example, let's say your goal is to get rid of 1 pound per week for 5 weeks, so that means we need to create calorie deficit of 3500 calories (below your TDEE) every week for 5 weeks to reach our goal. So just to make sure you understand: it's a 3,500 calorie reduction per week, NOT per day.

Let's say your TDEE=2800 then your goal should be to reduce or burn 500 calories so that at the end of the day your coming in at 2,300 calories, down from 2,800. 500 calories x 7 days a week gets you to your goal of 3,500 calories, or 1 pound, for the week.

Once you understand how this formula works you can now begin to your own personal diet plans for weight loss.

How To Do It

There a few ways you can get to your goal of burning or reducing your calories:

• Cut down the amount of calories you take in through food by 500 hundred calories a day.

• Burn the extra calories with exercise.

• A combination of both better habits at the table and becoming more physically active.

Which Is Best

In my opinion, when creating diet plans for weight loss a combination of both eating right and physical fitness is the best choice. For some people, trying to cut back 500 calories a day by just reducing food intake might be a little tough, and only using exercise to burn the calories might be a little too much as well.

So why not exercise to burn 1,750 calories during the course of the week and cut the other 1,750 by reducing your food intake, because 1,750x2=3,500 calories, or one pound of fat lost. Not only does exercise help with metabolic weight loss but good health and physical fitness has many other benefits aside from weight loss.

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